The Story Behind Siri, Its Name and Founder

Since Apple’s iPhone 4S launch, everyone has been talking about one awesome feature: Siri. Unlike Apple’s own innovations, Siri – the digital personal assistant wasn’t made by Apple.

Siri was founded in 2007 by Dag Kittlaus (CEO), Adam Cheyer (VP Engineering) and Tom Gruber (CTO/VP Design). Siri was originally developed as an iOS application available in the App Store and later acquired by Apple on April 28, 2010. It is now integrated part of iOS 5 and available only on iPhone 4S (taken from Wikipedia).

As per e24 article, Siri’s CEO Dag Kittlaus’s life (picture above) took a turn for the better following a special phone call from Steve Jobs last year. Dag recalls –

“Of course it was a great moment when Steve Jobs called and wanted to buy my company. It was surreal. When I heard that it was him, I knew we had made it big. In advance, we were pretty confident that the technology we had developed was so startling that we would get some kind of breakthrough. Steve was the first caller.”

Siri in Norwegian means “beautiful victorious counselor”. Dag named the Siri app after the famous Norwegian meteorologist and business woman Siri Kalvig, with whom he had worked during his tenure at Telenor, a Norwegian telecommunications company, while she worked for meteorologist company Storm.

In reality, Dag wanted to name his daughter Siri, but he got son so he instead named his company Siri .“Our first child was going to be named Siri, but then we got Markus”.